Author: Neil Bennett

Author: Cinema 4D R17 is out in September, with a focus on working faster and a more helpful control system.

Maxon Cinema 4D R17 has been released ahead of IBC 2015 conference later this week, following its announcement last month. There are new features across modelling, sculpting, animation and more – plus integration with Houdini and SketchUp.

You can watch the film Seed by Aixsponza, which was created in Cinema 4D R17 above.

Maxon Cinema 4D R17: new colour chooser

Maxon has added colour picking tools that you'd normally associate with Adobe's creative tools – including a new Color Chooser that includea a colour wheel, a swatch library and the abilities to pick colours from a photo (or simplified photos using the Photo Mosaic mode) and select complementary and harmonic colours.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17 has been released ahead of IBC 2015 conference later this week, following its announcement last month. There are new features across modelling, sculpting, animation and more – plus integration with Houdini and SketchUp.

You can watch the film Seed by Aixsponza, which was created in Cinema 4D R17 above.

Maxon Cinema 4D R17: new colour chooser

Maxon has added colour picking tools that you'd normally associate with Adobe's creative tools – including a new Color Chooser that includea a colour wheel, a swatch library and the abilities to pick colours from a photo (or simplified photos using the Photo Mosaic mode) and select complementary and harmonic colours.

Step 2

Maxon Cinema 4D R17: modelling

For modelling, redesigned spline tools offer more intuitive controls for editing points and lines, says Maxon – and use Boolean operators like Interest or Subtract to more quickly make changes.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: sculpting

Sculpting in Cinema 4D R17 has been given a major overhaul, with lots of new features being added. The highlights here include a new Sculpt to Pose Morph feature creates morph targets automatically on each sculpt layer. Also notable is Edge Detection, which lets you sculpt without overshooting the lines.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: animation

Animation improvements include weighted tangents to control F-Curves, Euler filtering to prevent Gimbal lock, new Timeline preferences and the ability to define animations using range markers.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: Take system

In Cinema 4D R17, you can save different versions of a scene – called Takes – within a single scene file. Maxon says that there's complete versioning and variation control.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: Lens distortion

The new Lens Distortion tools allows you to automatically generate profiles for the lens used for capturing footage, then 'flatten' the image for adding CG.

This profile can be applied across a range of clips, and added back in on rendering.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: Graph View

Cinema 4D R17's Motion Tracker gains a Graph View, which displays the quality of a track – so you can quickly identify problems and remove them (or rerun tracking).

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: Houdini and SketchUp integration

3D artists can load HDA (Houdini Digital Assets) from Side Effects Software’s simulation-focussed 3D suite Houdini into their scenes, and edit them like Cinema 4D’s own generators.

Artists can also bring in SketchUp models, allowing them to quickly access the huge number of free models available in this format.

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Maxon Cinema 4D R17: versions, pricing and shipping date

Cinema 4D is still available in four versions: the entry-level Prime, Broadcast for motion graphics design, Visualize for visualisation, and the all-singing, all-dancing Studio version. BodyPaint 3D (shown here) is available separately.

Cinema 4D R17 will ship in September. Pricing hasn’t changed, beginning at £600 for a full licence and £230 for an upgrade.